Posted on 01/06/2015 8:25:57 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
As if Silicon Valley hasn't given us enough already, it may have to start giving us all money. The first indication I got of this came one evening last summer, when I sat in on a meet-up of virtual-currency enthusiasts at a hackerspace a few miles from the Googleplex, in Mountain View, California. After one speaker enumerated the security problems of a promising successor to Bitcoin, the economics blogger Steve Randy Waldman got up to speak about "engineering economic security." Somewhere in his prefatory remarks he noted that he is an advocate of universal basic income—the idea that everyone should get a regular and substantial paycheck, no matter what. The currency hackers arrayed before him glanced up from their laptops at the thought of it, and afterward they didn't look back down. Though Waldman's talk was on an entirely different subject, basic income kept coming up during a Q&A period—the difficulties of implementing it and whether anyone would work ever again.
Around that time I had been hearing calls for basic income from more predictable sources on the East Coast—followers of the anarchist anthropologist David Graeber and the editors of the socialist magazine Jacobin, among others. The idea certainly has a leftist ring to it: an expansion of the social-welfare system to cover everyone. A hard-cash thank-you just for being alive. A way to quit the job you despise and—to take the haters' favorite example—surf.
Basic income, it turns out, is in the peculiar class of political notions that can warm Leninist and libertarian hearts alike. Though it's an essentially low-tech proposal, it appeals to Silicon Valley's longing for simple, elegant algorithms to solve everything. Supporters list the possible results: It can end poverty and inequality with hardly any bureaucracy. With more money and less work to do, we might even spew less climate-disrupting carbon.
The idea of basic income has been appearing among the tech-bro elite a lot lately. Mega-investor and Netscape creator Marc Andreessen recently told New York magazine that he considers it "a very interesting idea," and Sam Altman of the boutique incubator Y Combinator calls its implementation an "obvious conclusion." Albert Wenger, a New York–based venture capitalist at Union Square Ventures, has been blogging about basic income since 2013. He's worried about the clever apps his company is funding, which do things like teach languages and hail cars, displacing jobs with every download.
"We are at the beginning of the time where machines will do a lot of the things humans have traditionally done," Wenger told me in October. "How do you avoid a massive bifurcation of society into those who have wealth and those who don't?" He has proposed holding a basic-income experiment in the dystopian fantasyland of Detroit.
Singularity University is a kind of seminary in Silicon Valley where the metaphysical conviction that machines are, or soon will be, essentially superior to human beings is nourished among those involved in profiting from that eventuality. Last June, the institution's co-founder and chairman, Peter Diamandis, a space-tourism executive, convened a gathering of fellow industry luminaries to discuss the conundrum of technology-driven unemployment.
"Tell me something that you think robots cannot do, and I will tell you a time frame in which they can actually do it," a young Italian entrepreneur named Federico Pistono challenged me. Among other accomplishments, Pistono has written a book called Robots Will Steal Your Job, but That's OK. At the Singularity meeting he was the chief proponent of basic income. He cited recent experiments in India that showed promise for combating poverty among people the tech economy has left behind. Diamandis later reported having been "amazed" by the potential.
One might not expect such enthusiasm for no-strings-attached money in a room full of libertarian-leaning investors. But for entrepreneurial sorts like these, welfare doesn't necessarily require a welfare state. One of the attendees at the Singularity meeting was HowStuffWorks.com founder Marshall Brain, who had outlined his vision for basic income in a novella published on his website called Manna. The book tells the story of a man who loses his fast-food job to software, only to find salvation in a basic-income utopia carved out of the Australian Outback by a visionary startup CEO. There, basic income means people have the free time to tinker with the kinds of projects that might be worthy of venture capital, creating the society of rogue entrepreneurs that tech culture has in mind. Waldman refers to basic income as "VC for the people."
Chris Hawkins, a 30-year-old investor who made his money building software that automates office work, credits Manna as an influence. On his company's website he has taken to blogging about basic income, which he looks to as a bureaucracy killer. "Shut down government programs as you fund redistribution," he told me. Mothball public housing, food assistance, Medicaid, and the rest, and replace them with a single check. It turns out that the tech investors promoting basic income, by and large, aren't proposing to fund the payouts themselves; they'd prefer that the needy foot the bill for everyone else.
"The cost has to come from somewhere," Hawkins explained, "and I think the most logical place to take it from is government-provided services."
This kind of reasoning has started to find a constituency in Washington. The Cato Institute, Charles Koch's think tank for corporate-friendly libertarianism, published a series of essays last August debating the pros and cons of basic income. That same week, an article appeared in the Atlantic making a "conservative case for a guaranteed basic income." It suggested that basic income is actually a logical extension of Paul Ryan's scheme to replace federal welfare programs with cash grants to states—the Republican Party's latest bid to crown itself "the party of ideas." Basic income is still not quite yet speakable in the halls of power, but Republicans may be bringing it closer than they realize.
Karl Widerquist, a professor of political philosophy at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service in Qatar, has been preaching basic income since he was in high school in the early 1980s. He says that we are now in the third wave of American basic-income activism. The first was during the economic crises between the world wars. The second was in the 1960s and 70s, when libertarian heroes like Milton Friedman were advocating for a negative income tax and when ensuring a minimum income for the poor was just about the only thing Martin Luther King Jr. and Richard Nixon could agree about. (Nixon's Family Assistance Plan, which bears some resemblance to basic income, passed the House but died in the Senate.) The present wave seems to have picked up in late 2013, as the news went viral about a mounting campaign in Switzerland to put basic income to a vote. Widerquist is glad to see the renewed interest, but he's cautious about what the libertarians and techies have in mind.
"I don't think we want to wait for technological unemployment before having basic income," he says. For him the plan is not about averting the next disaster—it's about curbing the exploitation of the property system.
Riding way on the left side of the current wave of enthusiasm is Kathi Weeks. She's a good old-fashioned-in-certain-ways feminist Marxist who made basic income a central proposal in her recent book The Problem with Work. She advocates it cautiously, however: If a basic income were too low, people wouldn't be able to quit their jobs, but employers would still lower their wages. It could incline more businesses to act like Walmart, letting their workers scrape by on government programs while they pay a pittance. Workers might get money for nothing, but they'd also find themselves with dwindling leverage in their workplaces.
If we were to fund basic income only by gutting existing welfare, and not by taxing the rich, it would do the opposite of fixing inequality; money once reserved for the poor would end up going to those who need it less. Instead of being a formidable bulwark against poverty, a poorly funded basic-income program could produce a vast underclass more dependent on whoever cuts the checks. And as out-there as the idea can seem, Weeks's leftist critics complain that it's still a tweak, a reform. "It's not going to signal the end of capitalism," she recognizes.
Like pretty much all the shortcut solutions Silicon Valley offers, basic income would have its perks, but it isn't enough to solve our real problems on its own. There's still no substitute for organizing more power in more communities—the power to shape society, not just to fiddle with someone else's app. Social Security, for instance, came to be thanks to the popular struggles of the 1930s, and it carried huge swaths of old people out of poverty. Obamacare, a set of reforms mostly written by the industry it was meant to regulate, has turned out to be a far more mixed bag.
A basic income designed by venture capitalists in Silicon Valley is more likely to reinforce their power than to strengthen the poor. But a basic income arrived at through the vision and the struggle of those who need it most would help ensure that it meets their needs first. If we're looking for a way through the robot apocalypse, we can do better than turn to the people who are causing it.
They love spending OTHER PEOPLE’s money..... Where in heck do these idiots think the ‘basic substantial income is going to come from?” Morons each and every one
Screw that man. Quit your job, ride the gravy train, but...pst...buy some ammo on the way.
She doesn’t live here anymore!
It's really the same thing as when they promise free government healthcare . What you get is crap like the VA or worse . government healthcare sucks. and you'd get really much better healthcare in a free market without all these government regulations as you'd have more innovation , lower costs and choice and competition. but they lure idiots in with the promise of something “free” . so they think I won't have to pay for healthcare but you get put in some waiting list and some gov bureaucrat decides what inefficient treatment you get from an unaccountable doctor . so it's better to pay for it as you'd have choice. it's as if you went to socialism in electronics and the government made smart phones and told you what you could get . and of courser they'd say it's free .but you know what hell that would be , no choice , no freedom, web sites only approved by gov , ridiculous phones that won't work etc. so it's better to pay for health insurance and a smart phone than to get it free from these idiot socialists. even more general socialism magnifies the hell by a thousand times than these specific examples show. in short you get what you pay for.
The “Tech Elite”, just like the NYC/Bos/DC Elites, have to tow the liberal line, if they want continued access to ALL OF THAT MONEY...
Don’t play along, say something impolitic, and you’ll be cut off from those fancy yacht gay-orgy-with-kids parties, and the venture capitalists that go to them.
If such an idea could work, there would be no laws against counterfeiting.
Capitalism is based on symbolic bartering. Instead of trading a chicken for two loaves of bread, I pay money for the bread, and sell the chicken for money. That way, you aren’t stuck with a chicken and you have money that you can trade for something else.
Thus, the money is a proxy for the goods and services that would change hands in bartering, and its value is extrinsic. Giving money to non-producers sets the value of that money at zero, since it represents nothing.
We don’t have these magic robots yet so where will houses come from? Where will food come from?
We already have a “basic income”. It is called WELFARE. If we didn’t have a “basic income” kids would be on the streets starving...but they are not.
Now there’s A REASON why we have food stamps, WIC, Section 8, and other non-cash programs...and that is because the parents will blow the money on drugs, booze, and lottery tickets...to the point of their kids starving on the streets.
So, if the techies think that handing WADS OF CASH to these people is best, I suggest they try doing so and seeing what happens...as I guess they are simply UNABLE to understand it any other way.
That is communism and we all know how successful that was in the USSRussia.
neighborhoods with roving gangs of feral yout...
Arm the Armless!
Evidence for your bold assertion? That, in America, without welfare, children would be starving in the streets? Is that the way things were before the advent of welfare?
Regards,
Oh God.
I was depressed enough already.
I better get off the internet.
inner cities of detroit , camden, New Orleans, housing projects of Chicago, Cuba , Old soviet Union, N korea, the killing fields of cambodia ; they all got a basic income .It's called marxism and they are just decieving calling it by another name basic income and saying the silicon idols support and libertarians support it so that we think we should too. it is collectivism= marxism = socialism = central planning. it's always failed and always will . they always promise utopia “no one will have to work” everything is free, free healthcare (obamacare) , free housing(projects). yeah right it's slavery and evil. These socialists want to keep you small so they promise you a basic income . when anyone can be a millionaire in the capitalist system if they work hard ,be frugal, invest . investing money every day for 40 years compounding that money anyone can be a millionaire.they don't want you free and to think for yourself and to be independent. they are collectivists
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can exist only until voters discover that they can vote themselves largesses from the public treasury. From that time on, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.
"The average age of the world's great civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependency; from dependency back again to bondage."
India (40 years ago).
California Billion-nerds, please send those checks to:
The KG9 Kid
PO Box 123
Incline Village, NV
[ “...a space-tourism executive...”
That’s what I wanna be when I grow up. ]
Can I be a professional Video Gamer?
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